K7JEB AM Log: 23 May 2006 - 11 June 2006 5/23 Jim, K7SC, tells us on the 2-meter AM net that his next ER article will be one on the Lafayette HA-1200 2M AM transceiver. This article will be part of the series he has been writing on boatanchor VHF rigs. They are fun articles, not too long, that bring back memories of 6- and 2-meter operation in the pre-FM era. Not that there is anything wrong with VHF-FM except that it lost something when we ran out of vacuum-tube taxicab radios to convert to 2 meters and had to go with synthesized stuff from Japan. AE8O mentions he is having reliability problems with his cable modem; it keeps dropping the downlink data signal. I have had similar problems with mine and tell him they were cleaned up considerably by adding a bi-directional CATV amplifier between the cable coming into my house and the modem. I am given to believe that the wideband downlink data signal is way up there around 900 MHz, so cable loss/egress can be a real problem and juicing the signal up seems to help. K7SC and I have a QSO on 50.4 MHz AM and talk about starting up a 6-meter AM net here in Phoenix on that frequency. I think Jim was on his dual-band Hallicrafters for this QSO. W1ZD sees 'Da Vinci Code' movie, reports same, and gets a very negative critique of it from W8QBG. More computer crappola. One of the fans isn't turning in the existing power supply in my recently rebuilt computer and it is getting uncomfortably warm after prolonged operation. Back to the computer store where they (a) back-up the *right* disk drive for me and (b) sell me a new, shiny-black, 500-watt, "Gamer" power supply with a gold-plated guard grill on the fan and an LED that changes color from orange to green when the power supply goes from 'standby' to 'operate'. OK, Ok, I was taken in by the totally cool appearance of the unit. I really should have one of those new-style computer cases with Plexiglas sides and neon mood-lighting inside to properly display this new power supply. Later I measure the actual power consumption of the computer and find that it is barely over 150 watts. Oh.... Welllll.... 5/24 John, WA6JUS, puts the 'Big Mamu' on 40 meters for the first time with Bob, W6OOQ, in attendance. The 4-250's sound good on 7293 and the power is certainly appreciated with poor band condx. This higher-frequency operation was made possible by John's careful attention to shielding and filtering in his audio gear to prevent RF feedback. Ron, WA0KDS, sends over some e-pictures of the septic-tank excavation in his back yard as explanation for his non-presence on the AM freqs. The thing looks like the unearthing of some mummy's tomb. Life is tough on the frontier, even in downtown Phoenix. 5/26 George, W8QBG, offers a nice entertainment-center console free to whoever will haul it off but gets no takers. I guess there is a limit to ham scrounging after all. 5/27 WA6TJN and I start talking on 3855 about NSA electronic spying, get paranoid, and switch back to "safe" radio technical subjects. I mention that I am looking at constructing some audio distribution amplifiers for PC sound-card outputs and Ted suggests I consider the TDA 7053 from Philips as opposed to LM386's from National. Don't need that kind of power, actually, but find those parts interesting. Ted also advises a look-see at the National Semi Audio/Radio Handbook for circuits. WA6TJN gives WA6JUS some feedback about the recordings of the Bob Heil organ concert. Hopefully I'll get to hear that CD pretty soon myself. 5/28 I agree to sell this Gates Radio Solid-Statesman audio limiting amplifier to Bob, W6OOQ, to go with his Gates BC-1G transmitter. I hope that Bob will be going to the Williams hamfest, but no such luck. I agree to ship it over there after I fire it up (if you can do that with a solid-state box) and check it out for him. Run into Ernie, W7CCC, on 3860 lsb. I bitch about my negative experiences with the Icom 746pro on 2-meter AM (power output bouncing all over the place, but mostly down) and he offers to fix me up with a Clegg "loaner" if and when I want to take the 746 offline for repairs. TNX, Ernie! Ken, K6CJA, reports a number of good contacts on 10 meters -- probably Es stuff but the band is there if one looks for it. Damon, W7MD, seems to be having a running battle with his contractors at his desert QTH on keeping his antenna and feedlines up. If they aren't pulling on the antenna supports, they are wadding-up his ladder-line feeders or running over them with a dump truck. I try to get on 7293 AM and run into a very hairy spot of local noise in the form of a 'birdy' from a switching power supply or light touch-dimmer on 7292 kc. It makes copying the California guys (NI6Q, WJ6W, WA6TJN) who are trying out their 'Vintage Field Day, semi-QRP rigs impossible. I have to sign off -- first time that has happened in quite a while. I decide to get out the DF gear, but a few days later I can't find this particular piece of spurious junk on-frequency. Sometimes I think HF ham radio is going to die the death of a thousand bites from this barely certifiable Part-15 crap that is being sold these days. 5/31 I hear this strange 'swishing' noise on 75 meters this morning. It is at an S9 level on my receiver and seems to cover pretty much the entire 'phone' band, at least a 200 kHz bandwidth. I am about to chalk this up to yet another RFI/EMI assault by the neighbors with their Part-15 junk, but ask about it on an early-morning net I meet on 3860. The other guys are hearing the same thing in Nevada and California! In a way, that's a relief for me, but I wonder what the heck could it be that generates that much noise over that kind of bandwidth. When the sun comes up, the noise fades out, indicating a trans-Pacific source. And it doesn't reappear on subsequent days. Strange. 6/2 I query WM6S about his experience with a 'U-shaped' dipole for 160. He reports RFI problems with his neighbors with the arrangement although he adds that the thing wasn't very far off the ground. No doubt about it, Top Band requires perseverance. 6/3 Vintage Field Day today. Dave, WJ6W/6, and Bill, N6PY/6, make appearances on 3855 running, respectively, a DX-40 and an ART-13, the latter on battery power with a dynamotor. This leads to the other roundtable participants giving their station specs -- interesting stuff. Fairly good signals all the way around considering that it was 75 meters in broad daylight by that time. W7DEZ, Frank, in Tempe AZ checks in with a very nice sounding Viking Valiant on its 'maiden voyage' after some capacitor replacements and general working-over. Somehow we get off on a rag about "Old Highway 66", probably due to the way Williams AZ makes this part of their tourist business and therefore part of the hamfest. Quite a few of the guys have memories of driving or hitchhiking along the 'mother road' of the Southwest. Big transmitter news at W8QBG -- that is, news about a BIG transmitter. George got a line on the availability of a Bauer 707 broadcast rig in the Palm Springs area and very quickly put together an successful expedition to retrieve it and transport it by towed trailer back to Mesa. He reports that it is in reasonably good shape, only missing a front door, contactor cover and having a cracked feed-through insulator on first visual inspection. He will consult with Gary, W7GMK, about converting the transmitter to 160/80/40 operation, Gary having the same beast in his shack. The 707 is particularly nice in this respect, having a tube complement of a pair of 4-400's, modulated by same, with Bauer claiming the thing can be made to go up to 30 MHz. It will be nice to hear this rig on the 3870 AMI net on Wednesday nights as net control, won't it, fellas? After my touting Jim Tonne's program BCMap on the air and via e-mail, WA6TJN reports that it runs very slowly on his computer. I give it a spin on my old, trustworthy, 300-MHz Pentium II and, yeah, it does drag a bit. The reason is obvious, Jim computes the pattern shape for each station displayed every time the frequency or display is changed. This compute-intensive number-crunching is where Pentium-4-class machines really shine and, sure enough, there is almost a 10-to-1 speedup between my two boxes running the program. I shudder to think what it must be like on an original Pentium or (gasp!) a '486. Isn't there some variant of Murphy's law about programs automatically growing to completely fill any increase in computing power? Anyway, (touting now in progress) if you are a nut for AM broadcasting, or just like neat programs, download and try BCMap from WB6BLD. It displays a map of North America with the location and radiation pattern of every AM station on the air on a given frequency The map may be easily centered on one of a number of major cities or on an arbitrary lat/long set of coordinates (in the western hemisphere). The scale of the map itself and the size of the displayed patterns may be increased or decreased as desired. The map may be printed out to any Windows system printer. The program can be downloaded from: http://tonnesoftware.com/bcmap.html (end touting) Hear from Gordon, W8QAQ. He is looking for a manual for the Hallicrafters SX-122 he has and also for a hint on how to implement muting on it for operation with a transmitter. It has no Rec/Stdby switch on the front panel. I download the manual from BAMA for him and see that there is a jumper on the back that allows this function. I convert the manual from the Deja-Vu format (that BAMA unwisely adopted) to the more accepted PDF format with Irfanview and PDF Creator, two of my favorite freeware programs, burn it onto a CD-ROM and mail it off to him. Gordon also comments that the heat is really getting to him and he is thinking about going back to Michigan to get away from it. By the way, that thing I did for Gordon, grabbing manuals from BAMA and converting them to a CD-ROM, I am glad to do for anyone -- just ask. I just can't print-out complete manuals, But Kinko's can from the CD-ROM I provide. 6/4 K7CAX is back on 3855 after a motor-home trip up to the Show Low/ White Mountains hamfest on 6/3. He reports the presence of W7MD, K7JWA and K7BDY there as well, and generally sparse attendance. But someone showed up with a treasure trove of boatanchors and they sold like hotcakes. Notable among the BA's to change hands was a 51S3 for a lot less than E-Bay. After the hamfest W7MD retires to his cabin in the woods nearby for some R&R and QRP operation with a stealth antenna. Surprisingly large turnout on 3855 on 6/4. One newcomer heard with an interesting rig: WA7LYO running an Eldico SSB-100 on LSB+carrier. 110-degree days like 6/4 make me wonder if it can get too hot for the pigeons in my back yard to stop flying, kinda like the jets did when it hit 122 here a few years back. Much against my better judgment I am feeding a juvenile pigeon that fell out of one of the nests in my palm tree/antenna support. It is learning to fly and I am hopeful it will go away soon and not come back. 6/5 I get 3 e-pictures from Tom, W8QYT, of his summer QTH on Drummond Island in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I am immediately envious of the cool woods and the cool lake water out his front door. He also shows a very neat AM/boatanchor mini-shack. I cobble up a webpage and publish it at: http://www.arizona-am.net/OUTOFSTATE/W8QYT/ When I mention my QTH envy to George, W8QBG, he reminds me of the nightly clouds of mosquitoes and biting black flies that go with that part of the country in summertime. 6/6 (D-Day) Jim, K7SC, checks into the 2-meter AM roundtable with a Gonset 900A Sidewinder, sending me to the RigPix website for a photo. It's a bit of a problem because the Sidewinder doesn't have native AM. Jim re-injects carrier and we get one-sided AM, but nice and strong and not too much distortion - very workable actually. After the roundtable, I work Jim on SSB on 144.450 and am quite impressed with the stability and clarity of transmitted signal. An ER article on the rig is in the works, I am told by K7SC. KO6SM reports running the BCMap program with no hang-ups, but also on a fairly recent computer. 6/7 On 40-meter AM at noon with no significant noise sources (I do hear something buzzing away down on 7288). George, W8QBG is still searching for a door for his Bauer 707 and notes that he will probably have to do something about the blower noise from the rig. AE8O, Tom, over in Rio Rancho NM, advises that he has a Valiant on the way from a private sale and is already thinking about audio mods to the thing. He is also wondering where he will put it in his shack with all the other BA's. Should be a nice rig for Tom. 6/9 Lock, W1ZD, wonders aloud on 40 meters why there was anything left of this Al-Zawqari character who they took out with a couple of 500-lb bombs on his 'safe house' in Iraq. It does seem peculiar to me too, but I won't argue with the final result. Lock is on with his newly re-capped Drake 2-B receiver and reports excellent performance from it. He also tips me off to a guy who supplies replacement parts for Drake stuff, notably discrete-capacitor modules for those impossible-to-get filter-cap cans. (http://www.wa9tgt.com/). I like the guy's approach: Just mount the caps on a little, square PC board that picks up the hole pattern of the can's socket. I have a 3-hour land-line QSO with WA6TJN about the Motorola MC3361BP FM demodulator and other trivia. Thank goodness for flat-rate long-distance! George gets a Mirage Amplifier for 2 meters and interfaces it to his Clegg 22er. Sounds a bit rough but really cranks out the signal with a 120-watt carrier on 144.45. Drills right through my local noise here. 6/10 Max, K7CAX, loses one side of his 160/80 dipole to a broken wire. Vows to haul down the antenna from the palm tree in the 100+ temperature and re-attach the wire but has a plan: water-cooled antenna mongering. He will work on the antenna for a while then jump into his swimming pool to cool off then get back on the antenna job. I suggest he get Dale Ann out there with the garden hose to keep a spray of water on him all the time, fire-fighter style, while he works. Damon, W7MD, checks in from the White Mtns QRP on 3855 but it's a rough go. We move off freq to 3845 and continue on SSB. Maybe there is something to this purported 9 dB improvement in SNR with SSB... Nah! Back on 3855, George mentions that 'No-Money' Mike, KO6NM, is helping him out with his quest for a door for his Bauer 707 but that he still needs some a feed-through insulator to replace the cracked one in it. I dig around in my antenna junk and find a couple of rather funky-looking jobs that might fit the bill for George. I whip out my trusty HP945 plastic digital camera. take a couple of pictures of the insulators and e-mail them over to George. They look like they will fill the bill and we agree to meet later this week at his place for me to hand them off to him, see the Bauer, take some more pictures, etc. 6/11 K7CAX repairs his 160/80 antenna but now finds it slightly off-resonance for 1885 operation. He has bigger problems this morning, however. I hear a fair amount of distortion on his audio and he isn't seeing the modulator current swing he normally gets on his Viking 500. He goes off the air to check it out and on the next go-around reports that one of his 811 modulator tubes doesn't have a lighted filament. I think it is astounding we are hearing him at all. Max signs off, but returns later on his Viking Valiant looking for a spare 811. Meanwhile, K6CJA, W8JBT (Brian) and W8QBG are going hot and heavy with car talk, particularly Corvette and Avanti car talk. That's definitely a car culture up there in Motor City and these guys are still hooked. A very young W8QBG is pictured in the June '06 issue of ER. Tnx to WA6JUS for pointing that out. And that's all for now.... AM HONOR ROLL... (stations logged this period) W1ZD _______ WA7LYO _______ NI6Q K7SC _______ W7XH _______ W6BCN W8QBG _______ W8JBT _______ K7CAX W6OOQ _______ KC9GQ _______ K6IC WA6JUS _______ W7CPA _______ K5AYD W7MD _______ W7GMK _______ KD0PD WA6TJN _______ KO6SM _______ WJ6W/6 AE8O _______ W7QHO _______ N6PY/6 W0OGH _______ W7MD/7 _______ W7DEZ K6CJA _______ WD4PLI/6 _____ W7PLR AL0F _______ W8QAQ _______ K7JWA W7CCC _______